Picasso Relief Portraits

When I went to my state’s art education conference this fall, I saw a really cool project idea at the United Art booth. It was bright, colorful, and a relief sculpture! You can find it here. They gave me the lesson plan for it and I have been working on the sample for my students. I’ve taken pictures of most of my steps so that I can share with my students when they are ready to make it. Feel free to use it. 🙂 I started with painting the background piece of cardboard (8×10″).

Then I drew out my main head shape, painted it white, and cut it out.

Glue some smaller pieces of cardboard to the back and then glue it down to your background.

Create a profile view of just the head – not the nose, eyes, etc.

I painted another piece of cardboard white and then drew out the rest of my main pieces – eyes, lips, nose, forehead. I also added cheeks, eyebrows, and lids. The more pieces you add, the more interesting it can be.

I used my scraps from cutting all my other pieces to create the hair and neck. Now it’s ready to paint!

I painted with tempera and let it dry before using some black lines to add some depth and really make it pop!

I love this project and can’t wait to try it with my 6th graders!

UPDATE! We completed this assignment and the results are awesome! Check ’em out:

So proud of these!!

North Carolina Honey Bees

Some of my classes are participating in the NC Farm to School calendar contest. Second graders are learning about printmaking with this project and we are making honeycombs and bees. We started off with making the honeycomb with yellow paint, bubble wrap, and brown paper. Then we printed a big bee that I had made out of cardboard. We printed with black paint and next week we use oil pastels to go back and add some color. I think the oil pastels really make the bee pop and bring it to life with the extra colors.

We also did aValentine version!

8th grade ROCKS!

8th graders always seem to like doing this project because it allows them to express their personalities, no matter what their interests are, and work with their friends. I start out by looking at some “famous” guitars and their players with the class and discussing what makes the guitars stand out. Is it the guitar or the guitarist? Then we look at some funny and weird guitars – lego guitar, bigfoot guitar, etc. I put the kids in groups of two or three and they have to design, on paper first, a guitar that expresses some part of their personality. Then they have to actually create this guitar using cardboard and any other found materials (kind of Picasso-esque.) Each year the guitars get better and better! This year, one of my favorites was the brick wall guitar. The cheeseburger and hotdog guitar just make me laugh. : )